Development of a postal questionnaire to measure satisfaction with services received in the year before death.

Completed

Conditions: Symptoms and general pathology: Pain
Signs and Symptoms
Pain

Registration Number: ISRCTN12175122

Lead Sponsor: Record Provided by the NHS R&D 'Time-Limited' National Programme Register - Department of Health (UK)

Brief Summary: Not available

Detailed Description: Not available

Recruitment & Eligibility

Status: Completed

Sex: Not specified

Target Recruitment: 230

Inclusion Criteria

A random sample of death was drawn from death certificates of residents in an inner London health district who died from cancer and whose death were registered by someone resident in, or near, the district.

Exclusion Criteria

Not provided at time of registration

Study & Design

Study Type: Interventional

Study Design: Not specified

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Questionnaire responses. Of the 431 informants who were sampled for this study, 230 agreed to take part giving a response rate of 53%. This corresponded to 56% of those approached to become postal respondents and 52% of the informants approached to become interviewees. These results demonstrate that the postal questionnaire is a viable alternative to interviews for use in collecting information on outcomes in palliative care, at least in terms of response rate. Overall the results of this study show that the postal questionnaires are a viable alternative to a face-to-face interview in retrospective bereavement surveys of care for the dying. However, particular care needs to be paid to ensuring that the wording of the questionnaire is ambivalent and are understood by members of the target population, and, in particular that respondents are helped to identify whether the deceased did in fact receive care from target services. The VOICES questionnaire is currently being revised in the light of these findings.

Secondary Outcome Measures